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Think a lot of anti rhyme sentiments can be traced to Hollywood/BBC.
I remember watching Lord Peter Wimsey. He worked, in one ep, for an ad
agency. All he did was come up with daft rhymes. One for butter was “it’s
a far, far butter thing I do ..”

When I got my first job in ad agency in London it was a bit overwhelming. Nobody in my family had ever worked in the capital, or any big city for that matter, so there was nobody I could ask for advice.
But I took my work seriously, maybe too seriously for some people, and after work I really did not want to socialise with advertising people, I got enough of them at work.
Fortunately for me a school friend had been living and working in London for a couple of years.
She knew her way around the west end, and was training to be a nurse at University College Hospital.
So we would meet up about once a week, and I knew she worked very hard and was very dedicated to her training.
Sometimes she would visit my office in Covent Garden and just sit and take it all in, quietly overwhelmed herself at the amount of money flowing through this business, money that the NHS didn’t have.
One evening we out for a drink in a pub in St Martin’s Lane.
My nursing friend asked what was bothering me and I got pretty verbal and angry about a client who kept turning down my ideas for a trade ad for Bombay Gin.
Then I asked her about her week.
The nurse told me she had experienced a Code Blue in men’s surgical.
I asked her what that meant.
A Code Blue was a heart attack victim.
She had come on duty and found a man had fallen from his bed in the throes of a heart attack and was lying on the floor.
She told me she didn’t panic or get emotional, her training just kicked in and she lifted the guy onto his bed then phoned internally for the crash truck with the paddles for heart attack victims.
Unfortunately they couldn’t revive the man, and he died.
My nursing friend told me this in a very matter of fact way, stressing that her training had really worked.
And then I thought, I just work in advertising.
Advertising is simply an office job.
I don’t think I could have coped with a heart attack victim the way my friend had.
Because I did an office job, that’s all.

Back in 1996, my team and I were brainstorming a pitch for Singapore’s biannual Crime Prevention campaign. The brief was along the lines of “because Singapore has very low crime rates, Singaporeans and visitors to Singapore tend to take things for granted and let their guard down, making it easy for whatever criminals are out there to take advantage of their carelessness. We need to remind people not take things for granted.” Someone in the brainstorm said “So what we’re trying to say is that low crime doesn’t mean no crime, right?” And thus was born a slogan that is not only still in use 22 years later but has entered the national lexicon. If only agencies could charge loyalties for slogans like this!